 I guess my task here at the moment is to help give you a little bit of a roadmap to this issue and to describe its inner logic. And that logic really begins with the observation that even before the Great Recession we had pretty much near full employment and yet the American middle class was in deep trouble and particularly in trouble with its balance sheets. The savings rate had dropped to zero, levels of personal debt had exploded. I can remember I think it was five years ago in this room where we did an event with the McKinsey and Company studying the baby boom generation's prospects for retirement and as of 2006 at the height of the housing bubble only a third of baby boomers had adequate financial savings for retirement and even when you counted the then very inflated home equity only about 39% of baby boomers were on course to have a reasonably comfortable retirement. Millennials before the Great Recession were encumbered by unprecedented student loans often on predatory terms. It was a generation that was already coming to be known as generation debt. Generation Xers by the mid-oughts, a third of all children born to the middle class in the late 60s and 70s had already dropped out of it. And so we had a situation in which we had this hollowing out of the net wealth and solvency of various different generations of middle class people and it got to a point of course where even many people with jobs could no longer keep up with their mortgages and that essentially was the precipitating cause of the Great Recession. That's what was the spark that set off the financial contagion. Now there were many reasons to fear that or as bad as it was things of course got a lot worse. It's sort of like to borrow a phrase that James Carvel is using with his new book, it's like we all had pneumonia and then we got run over by a truck. So as Reid said, now we see a situation where since the beginning of the Great Recession the average family has lost 40% of its net wealth. If you look at that in generational terms it makes a big difference. The greatest loss is concentrated among Gen Xers and younger people with baby boomers not being in much better shape. So we start with the observation that net wealth matters, that balance sheets matter and that even if we were by some miracle of stimulus and tax cuts or whatever we were able to get the unemployment rate back to where it was in 2007 we would still be in a lot of trouble. So how did we get here? Why did this happen? I think it's useful to recall that some people including myself I'll say immodestly were able to predict as far back as the early 1980s that by the end of the last decade the middle class would be facing an insolvency crisis and you didn't have to be a genius to see this. The basic reason was changing demographics. We had a gigantic baby boom generation then in its prime productive years and it was not producing children at the rate that their parents had and that was going to cause a challenge to the future of social security and private pension plans. And that challenge came relatively quickly and what was probably the last act of true grand bargain bipartisanship in Washington Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill came together in 1983 to bail out the then completely bankrupt social security system. Social security had zero cash flow by the end of 1983 and we were literally months away from the system no longer being able to put out checks. So both parties came together and they made a grand compromise between raising taxes and cutting benefits. And the details of that was they raised taxes on younger people and they cut their younger people's benefits. And it took a couple of decades for the average person to figure out what had happened. But those of us who were following it knew what had happened. Our ideas of what a normal middle class retirement looked like were based on the experience of our parents who had on average taken about $250,000 to $300,000 more out of the system than they had contributed to it. It was a windfall benefit that became built into what we conceived to be the standard of living for the American middle class. But going forward there would be no more surpluses. Under this grand bargain there would only be people would basically get back from social security what they put into it. Which was okay except it meant everybody was going to have to save a lot more than they had in the past if they expected to live like their parents did in retirement. So we came up with all kinds of ideas. We came up with 401ks. We came up with IRAs. And these were in many ways an appropriate response to this great demographic change that we're having. Not only the aging of the baby boom generation but the dramatic change in the role of women in the workforce. The traditional pension plans very poorly served women because they typically only served people who had full-time employment with a single company. They didn't really serve the younger generation that was moving around from job to job much more. So it made sense that we rethought our retirement policy. And really in benefit of hindsight the changes we made back then were on the order of the new deal in their ultimate effects on American life except that they were mostly on the downside as it turned out. Because while these changes were appropriate we neglected certain key details like how were we going to make sure that people actually funded their 401ks or participated in IRAs. And as time went by we found out that most people literally most people never got a chance to take advantage of these new savings vehicles. And when they did most people were not prepared to manage these funds well. And of course this also happened to come simultaneously with the deregulation of Wall Street. So we were basically saying to this generation trust your retirement savings to the sharks on Wall Street while we were saving, telling the sharks on Wall Street that there were no more rules. And the result is really a disaster for the next generation of elderly. So most people now with the verge of retirement have no retirement savings. Those who do have about $60,000 in income and if Social Security is not cut Social Security may replace about a third of their income. And with the current course of health care spending even if Medicare is not cut we'll get a dramatically lower rate of standard of living for the next generation of elders. The next thing that happened was on the, we've been talking so far about the asset side. Next thing that happened was on the debt side. And here the story is really incredibly dramatic if you have any sense of the grand historical sweep. So going back to the Code of Hammurabi, right, the earliest civilization we know of. What was in the Code of Hammurabi a law against usury, right? Going back to the Old Testament we have Ezekiel telling us that usury is an abomination. In law kept interest rates at 12%. The Koran says that usury is the devil's work. Dante put usurers in the seventh circle of hell down there with sodomites, right? Martin Luther said that the highest interest rate you should ever have is 8%, right? The Puritans when they got to America the first law that they passed, right, was a usury law which stayed in place 150 years before the Constitution, through the Constitution, through all of American history until we came along, right? Because in the late 1970s some people decided we didn't need usury laws anymore. And so what we had was an explosion of predatory lending or usually not kind word for it, predatory, legalized. One way to frame this is at the same time that we were telling baby boomers and younger Americans that they were on their own for saving for the retirement, we exposed the same population to predatory lending without them having the financial education or the government protections they needed. What happened in essence is the conditions that led to the Great Recession. So what do we propose to do about it? In the piece or in the package, right, we have a great piece by John Kruvov drawing attention to that wonderful brainchild of Elizabeth Warren called the Consumer Financial Protection Board which turns out to be a much bigger deal than I think most people realize and we can talk about that later. But in short order we need to go back to the kind of financial regulation that has prevailed since the Code of Hammurabi until the 1970s. I don't think that's incredibly radical and the CFPB will probably be our mechanism for doing much of that. On the asset side we argue for something that was back when I first started working these issues in the 1980s considered completely radical and bizarre because it was against the libertarian grain of both Reaganism and much of Democratic Party thinking. We proposed a mandate, right, that people, human nature being what it is, if people need to save more for their retirement and old age there needs to be a requirement that they do so. And in this issue I sketch a blueprint for how we could craft a mandatory savings program for the millennial generation and its children. It's a daunting task according to the math I developed in this piece. If we get kids starting at age zero to save and we have them save 4% of their income, a typical lower middle class worker, by the time he or she ages age 67 under reasonable assumptions on what returns on capital might be, maybe look forward to a lifetime annuity of $33,000 a year starting at age 67. That's the magnitude of the challenge here. That's how dramatically important it is to get people saving early because even when you do you're looking at $33,000 in income and that with social security might get you by, right, but that's what it takes. Another approach we take in this issue is something that's not really much discussed in the normal conversations of the asset-building community, the people who have been focused on these kind of issues all along, and that is what can we do to help people derive more income and more security out of the assets that they already have? So we're not just talking about getting people to defer current consumption to buy little pieces of paper offered by Wall Streeters, right? What can they do, for example, with their own house to monetize that asset? So one example we describe in the piece is, in the package, is a very innovative program that the VA has that allows homeowners who have some sense of patriotism and civic purpose to earn a modest supplement to their income by taking in aging veterans who need nursing care in their declining years. Another we'll hear about or another one we discuss is why is it that we are as a government spending billions of dollars supporting green energy and having almost all of that money go to large corporations and very wealthy individuals? What could we do to get more of that, those green energy subsidies into the hands of ordinary Americans? For by example, doing what the Germans have done and allowing ordinary people to put solar panels on their house and sell electricity back to the grid. We'll also hear from Dana Goldstein in a minute about other ways that people can improve themselves through more savings. These things, I think, are within our reach. The key practical takeaway I hope you get from this is that we are at the moment spending about half a trillion dollars a year in subsidies for asset accumulation of one kind or another. That would be the money we're spending on the home interest deduction, on the preferential treatment of capital gains and other benefits, tax subsidies to savings and investment. And about 80 percent of that money is going to the wealthiest Americans. The top 1 percent is getting about $50,000 a year in tax subsidy while the average person is getting about $3. So we have a completely, we have an actually very aggressive asset building program but it is completely focused on people who are already rich and does almost nothing for people who have yet to accumulate assets. So we have the opportunity to turn that around and we also have the political moment coming up very soon because I think it's the Washington consensus right now that right away after this next presidential election, it's all going to be about tax reform. And everybody wants a simpler, fairer, better tax code. Well, this is our moment to begin to readjust these tremendous half trillion dollars in tax subsidies and get them going to the people who need to have it go. I'll just leave you with one thought which comes to us from James Galbreath, who's kind of known as a very liberal Keynesian economist. Keynesians are often at least perceived to be rather hostile to savings. But he makes the observation that with the benefit of hindsight, what really happened during the 1930s and 40s that got us out of the Great Recession? Of course we had a new deal and the new deal did a lot of very good things, right? It built a lot of infrastructure, it created a lot of temporary jobs. At the end of the 1930s, we were still pretty much stuck in the rut. What changed was World War II, which of course tremendously boosted product production and raised income, but more importantly, and this is the part that people forget and that James Galbreath is reminding us of, it boosted savings because we had the entire population practically out there buying war bonds. So when the war was over, people were expecting just to go back to the Great Recession except something completely different happened. What happened was of course the Great Post-War Boom, which was brought to you by the accumulated savings of working class Americans in the form of those war bonds. Those war bonds are what allowed the expansion of credit to the middle class that financed the Great Post-War Boom. So I think if we are going to take a lesson from history and learn from the last time we were anywhere near here, it is savings ultimately and rebuilding the balance sheets of ordinary people that brings us long-term broad prosperity. Thank you.